Chapter 10 #3
"I'm capable of making exceptions."
"You're capable of lying to yourself. That's a different skill set."
I close the distance.
My hands land on his chest, flat-palmed, fingers spread over the cotton of his shirt, and the heat of him is a shock against my perpetually cold skin.
His breath catches, involuntary, pulled from somewhere behind the humor and the glasses and every controlled performance he's ever given.
The involuntary quality of it sends a pulse of satisfaction through me that has nothing to do with tenderness and everything to do with the power of making Tommy react before he can curate the response.
His hands come up, one on my hip with fingers pressing into the denim harder than a man who types for a living should be capable of, the firmness a reminder of the pull-up bar and the dead lifts and the body he hides.
The other hand goes to the back of my neck, fingers threading into the short hair at my nape, and his palm is warm and his grip is certain and my knees nearly buckle, which is a physiological response I have never had and do not appreciate.
I push him backward, one step, then two. His thighs hit the edge of his desk and the monitors rattle and he catches himself with one hand on the surface while the other tightens on my neck.
The balance of power is mine for a breath before he turns me around and presses his body again mine—the advantage disappears into the collision.
His mouth finds mine. The kiss is the physical continuation of the argument, confrontational and raw, and neither of us yields.
I bite his lower lip, and he makes a sound against my mouth that is low and rough and travels through every point of contact between us, and the sound bypasses every analytical process I have and arrives somewhere primal.
"Tell me your rules." He says it between breaths, his mouth still against mine, and the fact that he's asking, that even now he's requesting parameters, makes me want to destroy his entire workstation.
"Don't stop unless I say stop. Don't assume what I want. Ask or figure it out."
"I figure things out for a living."
"Then prove it."
His hands go to the hem of my hoodie. He pulls it off in one motion, efficient, no fumbling, and the cool air hits my arms and shoulders and the tank top underneath.
He pauses, looks at my gloves, and his fingers close around my right wrist. He lifts my hand between us, and the deliberateness of the gesture, the way he studies the fingerless glove with the same attention he'd give a piece of code he's about to decrypt, makes something clench low in my belly.
He pulls the glove off slowly. The exposure of my bare hand in this workspace, this space where everything I touch is interface, feels more intimate than the kiss.
He does the same with the left, sets both gloves on the desk beside his glasses, which are already off, and my hands are bare and his face is bare and the barriers are gone.
"My turn," I say, and my hands find the buttons of his shirt. I've been thinking about the body underneath since the gym, and the thinking has been corrosive, eating through my operational focus at intervals I can't predict.
The reality of his skin under my cold fingers is better than the projection. Lean muscle over solid bone. The kind of strength that doesn't announce itself.
I push the shirt off his shoulders and he lets me, and the confidence in the letting, the lack of self-consciousness from a man who hides this body from his entire team, tells me that whatever we are right now is something he doesn't hide from.
He lifts me onto the desk. My back hits the monitors and a keyboard slides and something beeps a protest that neither of us acknowledges.
His hips are between my knees, and his hands are on my thighs, and his mouth is on my neck, three points of deliberate contact that create a sensory map my brain attempts to process and fails because the data input is exceeding capacity.
I pull his mouth back to mine, fingers in his hair, gripping, and the grip is a claim. He responds by pressing closer, one hand sliding up my thigh while the other finds bare skin at my waist where my tank top has ridden up.
His palm on my skin is warm and precise, and I can feel the calluses from the pull-up bar, rough against my hip bone. The texture is a reminder that his hands are not what I expected and nothing about this is what I expected.
We fight for control and neither of us wins and the fighting is the point.
Every time I gain leverage, shifting my weight, pulling him closer by the waistband of his jeans, he recalibrates, adjusting his angle, finding a new point of contact that makes my breath stutter.
Every time he presses an advantage, his mouth on my collarbone, his thumb tracing a line that makes my hips move against my will, I counter with teeth on his shoulder, nails down his back, a sound whispered in his ear that makes his rhythm falter.
"You're testing me." His voice is rough, his breath hot against my throat. "The way you test systems."
"Is it working?"
"You tell me." His hand moves, and the precision of the movement is devastating, and the sound I make is involuntary in a way I don't permit. His response to the sound is a sharp intake of breath that tells me my loss of control affects his more than any deliberate action could.
"That's cheating."
"That's pattern recognition. You gave me data. I extrapolated."
"Extrapolate harder."
He does. His hands find the hem of my tank top and strip it and my bra off, and the air hits bare skin and his gaze drops to my chest with an attention that is cataloging and hungry in equal measure.
His mouth follows, and the first contact of his lips against my breast shorts out the analytical process I've been using to maintain the upper hand.
I arch into him. The involuntary quality of it infuriates me. My fingers grip his hair and pull his head back, and the look on his face, glasses gone, hair destroyed, mouth wet, is data I will weaponize later and want now.
My hands go to his belt. The buckle gives under the mechanical efficiency of a woman who doesn't fumble, and the button and zipper follow in a sequence so practiced my fingers don't pause between steps.
I shove his jeans and briefs down his hips in one pull and the sight of him, hard and straining, sends a pulse of heat through my belly that has nothing to do with clinical observation.
I take him in hand, hot and thick against my palm, and his breath catches with the sharp involuntary intake of a man who just lost the last thread of composure he was holding.
The sound he makes is low and gratifying in a way that has nothing to do with generosity and everything to do with the power of reducing Tommy to a reaction he can't curate.
"Efficient," he manages, and the word is barely steady.
"I don't fumble."
"No." His hand covers mine, adjusting my grip, and the correction is so characteristically Tommy that a sound escapes me that might be a laugh if I had the breath for it. "You don't."
He strips off the rest of my clothes efficiently. I hook my legs around him, drag him closer, and when he pushes inside me the stretch of it, the fullness, bypasses every firewall I've built.
My head drops back. My fingers dig into his shoulders. The sound that comes out of me is raw and unfiltered and I don't recognize it as mine.
He stills. His forehead pressed against my collarbone, his hands gripping the edge of the desk on either side of my hips. I can feel the effort it costs him to hold still in the tension of his arms and the shudder that runs through his chest.
"Move."
He does, and the rhythm he sets is deliberate and devastating, each stroke a study in what makes my breath fracture.
He learns me in real time. Adjusts the angle when my hips shift. Reads the catch in my breathing the way he reads threat data, and each discovery builds on the last until my vision blurs and my vocabulary fails.
I refuse to let him run the show alone. I shift my weight, take control of the pace, and the sound he makes, low and broken, tells me his precision has limits and I just found them.
His ribs under my palms. The line of muscle in his back that flexes when I change the angle.
The spot below his ear that makes his hips stutter when I press my mouth to it.
The way his whole body responds when I tighten around him deliberately, and the look on his face when his control dissolves is worth every calculated risk I've ever taken.
"Cheating," he says against my neck, breathless, echoing my accusation from earlier.
"Pattern recognition." The laugh that tears out of him is short and helpless and real, and the vibration of it travels through every point where our bodies connect.
Then his thumb traces my cheekbone. The gesture is incongruent with everything else, so far outside the competitive framework that my rhythm stutters. A touch that doesn't demand or challenge or claim. It just finds me.
The gentleness of it, surrounded by everything that isn't gentle, produces a reaction in my chest that has nothing to do with the physical and everything to do with the terrifying recognition that Tommy is touching me like I matter outside of this.
I turn my face into his palm. The gesture is involuntary. I don't catalog it.
The power shifts back and forth, rapid and fluid. Every time he finds an angle that makes my nails leave marks, I counter by pulling him deeper, whispering something against his ear that makes his rhythm break.
We fight for control and the fighting is the point, and the moment when control stops being the point arrives without warning.
His hand moves between us, and the combined pressure of his fingers and the fullness of him inside me builds something at the base of my spine that my body recognizes before my brain does.
The tension coils tighter with each stroke, each shift, and I can feel him close too, the rhythm losing its precision, his breathing ragged against my throat, his hands gripping hard enough to leave bruises I'll find tomorrow.
"Look at me." His voice is raw in a way his humor never allows.
I do. His eyes are stripped of every defense, every performance, every layer of glass and wit and deflection, and what's underneath is a man who sees me the way I see his code. Completely.
The seeing is what breaks me open.
I come with his name in my mouth and his eyes on mine and the orgasm hits like a system crash, total and absolute, every process offline.
He follows with a sound I will carry in permanent storage for the rest of my operational life, rough and open and entirely his, his forehead against mine and his hands shaking on the desk.
For a handful of seconds the system is offline and there is nothing but sensation and the sound of his breathing and the server hum underneath everything, steady as a heartbeat.
After.
The workspace is quiet. The screens glow. The evidence is written across us both and across the desk surface, and the monitors are displaying login screens because my shoulder hit the keyboard at some point and the keystroke registered as an input command.
The absurdity of my body accidentally committing code while his hands were dismantling my capacity for syntax is the first thing that makes me want to laugh in this facility.
I put my clothes on in the glow of monitors. My gloves go back on last, finger by finger, and the reversal of the way they came off carries a weight I don't examine.
Tommy watches from his chair, his glasses back on, his hair destroyed, his jeans and briefs pulled up.
His shirt unbuttoned and untucked with marks on his shoulder that I put there.
He's watching me with the expression of a man who has just confirmed a hypothesis he's been running for days and doesn't know what to do with the results.
"That doesn't change anything." My voice is level, controlled, the lie flawless in its construction.
"It changes everything." His voice is quiet, stating rather than arguing, the way he writes code comments, with the certainty of someone who has observed the data and trusts the conclusion.
Neither of us is wrong. The paradox sits between us like a variable that resolves to two values simultaneously, and neither of us is willing to be the observer because observation would require committing to one truth over the other, and commitment is the territory we've both spent our lives avoiding.
I walk to the door. Behind me, Tommy's keyboard starts, rapid and even, building something new.
The corridor is dark. The taste of him is on my mouth. My hands are steady. The weapon is still counting down.